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Photo: Frank Hajek

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Testimonials

“I visited Cocha Cashu first as a young postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian. During my first season of work there, I resolved to shift my research from paleontology of early angiosperm floras to patterns of biodiversity and biogeography of lianas in neotropical forests. Cocha Cashu was so well run, the forests so precious, and the opportunities so obvious, that the transition was logical: the only thing I could do! I have never looked back, never regretted that transition for an instant. I have had several subsequent field seasons there, and each one gave that same appreciation for a forest that has the potential to change every life it touches.”

Robyn J. Burnham

“Cocha Cashu literally changed my life. As a Princeton graduate student with John Terborgh in the mid-1970s I helped cut and map the original trails, set the original mist-net lines for bird studies, and began to document the area's extraordinary bird and mammal diversity. I became a tropical ecologist and a passionate conservation scientist while striving to untangle the many hundreds of parts that make up Cashu's orchestral dawn choruses, and carefully measuring how eighty (80!) species of Tyrant Flycatchers make their living together at one place. I woke up each day mesmerized by the spiritual chants of Red Howler Monkeys, and closed my weary eyes most nights to the mournful whistles of tinamous and potoos. Cocha Cashu and the Manu National Park provide scientists the singular chance to study pristine American tropics squarely at the epicenter of the greatest diversity of biological life on planet Earth. Nobody who is lucky enough to work, or even visit, this amazing place will ever walk away untouched by its towering riches, nor unmoved by its timeless call to the deepest places in our human soul.”